No, it’s really not. Not if your takeaway from it is, “DOE says we can do it, so we can do it.”
Quoting from the report:
Bolding mine. There are a lot of things in this world that are feasible, “if significant challenges are overcome”. Including safe, cheap nuclear power.
Also note that the partners in the assessment incude ‘Leading wind manufacturers and suppliers’ and ‘Others in the wind industry’.
I think this has to be treated as an advocacy piece, given the people involved. For example, the report spends a lot of its content describing the benefits of wind power, rather than just talking about the feasibility of building it.
It also appears that they started with the conclusion and worked backwards. They were told, “Hey, we want 20% Wind in 20 years. Write up a report that tells us what we need to do to get there.”
The report is fully of caveats, best-case scenarios, and starts off with a set of assumptions that may or may not be correct. For example, it assumes:
- A stable policy environment supporting accelerated wind development
- Capital costs for wind would be reduced by 10%, and capacity factors increased by 15%.
- Future environmental study and permit requirements do not add significant costs to wind technology.
- Cost of new transmission split between the project and taxpayers in the region
Plus a bunch of other things. We already know that there will be challenges to proposed wind farms by environmental and other groups, and that they will be expensive. Cape Wind got stopped because of it. Other big wind farms have been delayed and incurred costs due to environmental challenges. It’s unrealistic to assume that this will no longer be the case.
And by the way, if we applied those same assumptions above to nuclear power, it would be much, much cheaper. No environmental challenges, a 10% reduction in capital costs?
The report language itself heavily uses phrases like, "ambitious growth’, and ‘numerous challenges’. It also says, “a great deal of uncertainty remains about the level of contribution that wind could or is likely to make.” They then go on to say, “This report sidesteps those uncertainties.”
They also point out that there is another estimate of wind energy production out there: “In the 2007 Annual Energy Outlook (EIA 2007), an additional 7 GW beyond the 2006 installed capacity of 11.6 GW is forecast by 2030.”
So the EIA says that actual trajectory is for 7 GW more. This report calls for 305GW of additional expansion in the same time frame. That’s a pretty damned big gap!
Also, that last one about getting ratepayers to pay for transmission lines out to remote wind sites is essentially a subsidy for wind, since other energy sources don’t require that kind of expansion of grid transmission.
So these guys were asked to come up with a scenario for achieving 20% wind by 2030, and they did so. The question is whether the scenario is particularly realistic. It shows that it might be possible, but it also shows that it’s highly unlikely. It requires major changes to industry, an exponential increase in manufacturing and capacity while actually lowering cost - there aren’t necessarily economies of scale available here - if anything, a rapid build-up may increase costs due to shortage of trained labor and materials.
That report has a lot of stuff in it that makes me shake my head. For example:
That strikes me as an asinine comparison. Natural gas turbines are a completely different kind of animal - they are relatively inexpensive, using mature technology, and very energy dense. Just saying that you can build 16 GW of wind turbines per year because you’ve built 16 GW of gas turbines strikes me as an almost irrelevant point - like saying you can build the wind turbines because you build X number of cars per year. They are completely different technologies.
Let’s close by quoting the full conclusion of the report:
That’s not a very upbeat way to end, is it? So basically, this report is saying, “Okay, if we want to get to 20% wind by 2030 it might be doable, but there are a whole lot of roadblocks. We’d have to subsidize it, make major changes to the grid, get taxpayers to pay for the transmission lines out to the wind plants, figure out a way to lower costs by 15% and increase turbine efficiency. Oh, and we’ll have to shut down those environmentalists with their pesky lawsuits, and be really smart about how we organize our electricity infrastructure - much smarter than we are now. If we do all of those things, then maybe we can get to 20% wind if this one particular scenario holds and no other unforseen problems crop up.”
In other words, don’t hold your breath.
And think about the goal - 20% wind by 2030. Is that good enough for everyone? We have no problem getting 80% of our power from fossil fuels twenty years from now? I guess global warming isn’t quite the problem people say it is, if this is their idea of the proper solution.
Why don’t we just wave a magic wand and create magic ponies that shit pure power and eat CO2 right from the air?? Dude…seriously. If we could just replace 20-25%(!!) of our power with wind and solar immediately we’d be doing it. Or, if you think that the US is in the pocket of Big Business™ or Evil Fossil Fuel Power(aar) then someone else would be doing it…like, say, the Chinese, who are trying desperately to ramp up their electrical generation. I mean, seriously…these guys are willing to spend literally billions and displace literally millions of people from their homes in the name of getting more power. Why aren’t THEY building their electrical generation based on wind and solar? Are they also in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry??